TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – It’s likely Jeb Bush could have tapped his reputation as governor and an extensive fundraising network to keep a key U.S. Senate seat – and possibly a filibuster-proof majority – out of Democratic hands in 2010.

But the president’s younger brother said he won’t run for Republican Mel Martinez’ Senate seat, and political experts say Florida’s race is a toss-up. Neither party has come up with a name as big as Bush, the only Republican elected to two terms as the state’s governor.

It could prove a challenge for the once-dominant GOP in the wake of President-elect Barack Obama’s victory in Florida, as Democrats widened their grassroots operation and stepped up their fundraising efforts.

“It’s going to be a big race, it’s going to be an expensive race,” said Jamie Miller, a Florida-based Republican political consultant who has worked on Senate and statewide campaigns. “The stakes are much higher.”

If Al Franken’s recount victory in Minnesota holds, Democrats will have 59 seats, just one shy of being able to stop a Republican filibuster. With complete Senate control on the line, both parties will put a lot of resources into Florida. Bush, who won the 1998 and 2002 gubernatorial elections by more than 10 percentage points, announced this week he wouldn’t run after previously saying he would consider it. Now, only two candidates known to be considering a Senate run have won a statewide race: Democratic Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink and

Republican Attorney General Bill McCollum. Each would have the advantage of name recognition and a statewide support network in a primary.

There also are several congressmen from both parties considering a run, as well as former legislative leaders.

Until recently, Republicans dominated Florida politics. Between 2000 and 2004, Republicans won seven of eight statewide races, while building leads in the state Legislature and in Florida’s representation in Congress. The state GOP raised more money and had a strong grassroots operation.

But Democrats have done a better job registering new voters and turned out more early voters during November’s presidential election, helping Obama carry Florida.

Democrats have become less apprehensive about Florida since the party has split six statewide races with Republicans since 2006, said David Beattie, a Democratic strategist based in Fernandina Beach.

“It’s going to be a nationally watched race just because of the size of the state and the impact, and the fact that it’s starting now,” he said. “It’s not going to be a boring time.”

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has been wooing Sink, who was preparing to announce re-election plans for her CFO seat when Martinez said last month he wouldn’t seek a second term.

Since then she’s been reconsidering, especially with the pressure from Washington.

McCollum was planning to seek another term as attorney general, but immediately said he will think about the Senate seat. That’s no surprise, considering he’s lost two previous Senate races.

Florida’s diverse population includes nearly 4 million registered Republicans, 4.5 million Democrats and nearly 2 million unaffiliated voters. It can be tough for little-known candidates to spread their message across the vast territory from the western panhandle to the southern peninsula, which includes both sprawling urban centers and rural enclaves. Statewide TV ads can cost up to $1 million a week.

Candidates who don’t have statewide name recognition realize they have to start campaigning and fundraising soon. Miller estimates a winning campaign could cost as much as $35 million.

“It’s really going to be a challenge. The good news for all Republicans is the name Obama will not be on the ballot,” said David Johnson, a Tallahassee-based Republican political strategist.

He added that Gov. Charlie Crist’s bid for re-election could also help drive Republicans to the polls.

But Obama could might help sway more voters than Crist could, said Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Karen Thurman.

“My guess is that there will be some strong, strong abilities for fundraising,” she said. “We have a president who can click a button and raise $50 million.”

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama hailed a rare Oval Office gathering of all U.S. presidents as extraordinary on Wednesday, while President George W. Bush wished him well and pledged that the office “transcends the individual.”

“I just want to thank the president for hosting us,” the president-elect said, flanked by former President George H.W. Bush on one side and his son on the other.

Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, both smiling broadly, stood with them.

“All the gentlemen here understand both the pressures and possibilities of this office,” Obama said. “For me to have the opportunity to get advice, good counsel and fellowship with these individuals is extraordinary.”
 
In a swift photo opportunity, the current president wished Obama well before all five men headed off for a private lunch.

“I want to thank the president-elect for joining the ex-presidents for lunch,” Bush said, even though he’s not quite a member of that club yet.

“One message that I have and I think we all share is that we want you to succeed, whether we’re Democrat or Republican we care deeply about this country,” Bush said. “All of us who have served in this office understand that the office itself transcends the individual.”

Bush and Obama also met privately for roughly 30 minutes.

In a few years, taxpayers could be supporting George W. Bush’s library at Southern Methodist University in Texas without having any authority to access the presidential papers housed there.

President-elect Obama and the new U.S. Congress should quickly correct this injustice.

In 1978, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and the prolonged legal fights over presidential records and executive privilege, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act. It was intended to give the American public access to most presidential papers well after the end of the chief executive’s terms.

The act was not a radical document. It compromised the public’s desire to see these records with real-world necessities. Most of the records are not available for 12 years after a president leaves office, and others can be blocked indefinitely for purposes such as national security and personnel privacy.

Unfortunately for the public, however, just about every president since Jimmy Carter has tried to undermine the law. George W. Bush, with an executive order issued on Nov. 1, 2001, less than a year into his presidency, essentially repealed the law.

Bush’s order gives almost absolute power to a former president or vice president, or that person’s family and descendants, to block the release of these papers. It also increases the number of exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act, thus weakening public access, and it shifts the advantage in public-records litigation from the public advantage to those blocking release.

It is important to understand that this order did not improve national security in the days after the terrorist attacks. National security was already protected in the acts. This order simply protects Bush and other former presidents from the political inconvenience of having their records – which are public property – examined by scholars and the public.

Several attempts to override Bush’s order have failed in Congress. Lawsuits have also failed on technical issues, albeit important legalities but not issues related to the public’s right to know.

While in the Senate, Obama co-sponsored a bill that would have overridden the Bush order. And a Web site tied to his campaign endorsed efforts to correct this situation. But promises from candidates often go unfulfilled, especially when higher-profile concerns face the public. Furthermore, as a future former president, Obama will have a personal stake in siding with Bush on this issue.

Obama must side with the public. These are public records and in time they should be available to the public and to scholars. Obama should countermand Bush’s order and Congress should formulate a new, strong law to protect access to these important historical records.

By MARSHA MERCER
Media General News Service

WASHINGTON – Karl Rove, trying to polish the tarnished image of his former boss, wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal, “In the 35 years I’ve known George W. Bush, he’s always had a book nearby.”

Not only that, but Rove, Bush’s longtime political adviser and former White House deputy chief of staff, has had a reading contest with the president for the last three years.

Rove bragged that he has read more books than Bush each year, but he reports that Bush found time to read 95 books in 2006, 51 books in 2007 and 40 books by Dec. 26, 2008.

At a holiday party, I mentioned Bush’s surprising feat — and was nearly hooted out of the room.

“Must have been comic books!” one person chortled. 

“No, picture books!” howled another.

You know a president is held in low esteem when the very idea that he’s a reader is a source of high hilarity.

The commonly held view of Bush as a reluctant reader can be found in an upcoming article in Vanity Fair, “Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush Presidency.”

While silent on Bush’s leisure-reading habits, the long article blasts the president on almost everything else from Inauguration Day 2001 forward. Commentary from many former White House officials and a few foreign ones marches through the years, pointing out what went wrong when. 

Richard A. Clarke, former White House counterterrorism adviser in the Bush and Clinton administrations, provides a nugget about Bush’s workday reading, or lack of same.

Clarke said that he was told “early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader…I mean the president of the United States is not a big reader?”

To be sure, Clarke is a severe critic of Bush and his foreign policy. He supported Barack Obama in the last election. But the image of Bush as a non-reader is ingrained in the national psyche.

When the White House released the president’s summer reading list in 2006, it was skeptically received. It included “The Stranger” by existentialist Albert Camus and other serious historical and biographical tomes.  

This played against type. The president’s “bring it on” persona is as an incurious man, an intellectual lightweight.

Rove insists this is a myth. But he undercuts his own argument with his description of their competitive reading. The contest began when Bush learned that Rove had made a New Year’s resolution to read a book a week in 2006. A few days later, Bush turned the quest into a competition. It became more about quantity than content.

Here’s Rove: “We kept track not just of books read, but also the number of pages and later the combined size of each book’s pages – its ‘Total Lateral Area.’” 

Surely, someone who cared about the ideas in a book wouldn’t have needed to count the number of pages as a measure of his reading success.

Beyond that, it seems obvious, if gratuitously grumpy to say so at this late date, that the president should have been paying attention to his workday reading. And one wonders where the book buddies found time between Bush’s workouts and his early bedtime for their reading and measuring and counting.

So we’re left at the end of the Bush presidency with two Georges – cowboy and bookworm. Rove’s explanation:

“He plays up being a good ol’ boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader.”   

I’ll leave it to the shrinks and historians to probe why the president chose not to look smart, if that’s what he was doing.   

Still, give Bush his due. He may not have been reading long memos. And he may have been reading as competitive sport. But it was reading.

Reading a book a week – or even 40 books in a year — is more than many of us, myself included, can claim.

White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley remember conferring with President Bush during the darkest days of the Iraq war, in 2005 and 2006, when violence was out of control.

LEXINGTON  — In the first year of his presidency George W. Bush was forced to confront the crisis of global terrorism. He responded by aggrandizing his power as president under the theory of a “unitary executive.”

The controversial and thoroughly repudiated policies that resulted, including warrantless surveillance of Americans’ phone conversations, torture, and disregard for the basic constitutional rights of detainees, represented the most sweeping assertion of unchecked executive power in generations.

It was a credit to his campaign that Barak Obama strenuously rejected President Bush’s vision of an all-powerful president and promised that, if elected, he would operate within constitutional and statutory restraints that had been flouted by the Bush administration.

That was before Obama won the election and acquired the powerful mantle of the presidency. And that was before it was clear that his first year in office also would be dominated by a crisis, albeit this time taking the form of a severe recession.

But what was worth criticizing with respect to the Bush administration goes equally for the Obama administration. The president-elect campaigned for a less robust presidency. It would be an unfortunate and ironic turn if he now invoked the faltering economy to justify an executive power grab.

TO KEEP his promise President-elect Obama should revisit the $700 billion bailout bill enacted by the lame-duck Congress in September and insist upon congressional oversight of the use of the rescue funds. He should refuse to sign any future legislation that seeks to respond to the economic crisis but fails to ensure the executive branch’s political accountability through congressional oversight. He should refuse to follow President Bush’s alarming example in awarding billions in emergency bailout dollars to the auto industry when Congress expressly had refused to do so.

In the face of the Bush administration’s national security abuses I argued that Congress must restore the checks and balances within which our federal government was meant to operate. I won’t change my tune because there is a different party in the White House or because the crisis this time is economic in nature.
Our finely wrought system of constitutional governance gives Congress the responsibility for formulating and enacting policy through deliberative and representative processes. This system makes us our own masters. Threats and crises always have been used to justify expansions of executive power, but doing so fosters unchecked and unaccountable power that often operates beyond our reach and against our interests.

This should have been established, once and for all, by the 1975 Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The “Church Committee,” as it came to be known after its chairman, Idaho Sen. Frank Church, pursued a sweeping investigation of the executive branch’s Cold War abuses in the secretive intelligence and security empire that successive presidents from both parties had built up beyond the reach of Congress.

THE 14 VOLUMES of reports the committee produced remain the most comprehensive public accounting of the workings of America’s shadowy intelligence community. They reveal a confounding range of compromises and crimes that were justified as necessary to counter the nuclear-armed threat posed by the Soviet Union.

Americans were spied on. Foreign leaders were assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. was blackmailed. In the words of Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., counsel to the Church Committee, these executive excesses did not make us safer and they certainly made us less free. We should have been consulted, via Congress’ oversight of these activities, on these dreadful policies.

The parallels between the work of the Church Committee and the Bush administration’s abuses in the war on terror are clear. The president again betrayed our highest principles in order to spy on Americans at home and to undertake human rights violations abroad. But the Church Committee stands for a more general lesson that is no less relevant for President-elect Obama as he responds to the worsening economic crisis.

The Church Committee’s investigation stands as a monument to faith in constitutional governance and a stubborn commitment to the Founding Fathers’ vision of limited and representative government secured by checks and balances, even in the face of serious national trials. Obama is being handed billions of dollars in discretionary authority to confront the economic crisis. He would be wise to wield that power humbly and with due deference to Congress, just like he promised he would.

Russell A. Miller is an associate professor of law at Washington & Lee University School of Law. He is the editor of the newly published book U.S. National Security, Intelligence and Democracy: From the Church Committee to the War on Terror (Routledge). Contact him at millerra@wlu.edu.

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration is coming to the rescue of the troubled U.S. auto industry, offering $17.4 billion in loans in exchange for concessions from carmakers and their workers.

President George W. Bush says letting the automakers collapse is “not a responsible course of action.”

He says the rescue plan will require “meaningful concessions” from the auto companies and others, including labor unions and suppliers. The companies, he says, “must understand what is at stake, and make the hard decisions necessary to reform.”

Bush says he ordinarily would let the companies go bankrupt, concluding it’s the “price that failed companies must pay.” But, he says, “These are not ordinary circumstances.” He says letting the industry collapse, amid a financial crisis and a recession, would be irresponsible.

He says there’s “too great a risk” that a bankruptcy filing would lead to a “disorderly liquidation of American auto companies” and send the economy into a “deeper and longer recession.”

CARLISLE, Pa. – President George W. Bush says that while there has been lots of debate about his policies, there can be no argument that America has been kept safe since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

In a speech at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., Bush said Wednesday that after the attacks, he set up an elaborate plan to reorganize the governmental apparatus to confront such threats. He said the United States has worked at the same time to nurture alternatives to hateful regimes.

The speech was part of what amounts to a presidential legacy tour, with Bush using his bully pulpit he still has to frame how the country will judge his service. His final day in office will be Jan. 20, when Barack Obama will be sworn in as president.

Barack Obama may have only won North Carolina by the smallest of margins in last month’s Presidential election but when it comes to who the state’s voters think will do the stronger job between him and the current President, it’s no contest, the PPP reports.